y commonly used at Rome. Martial, whose
epigrams have been a source of so much information in medical history,
especially on subjects with regard to which information was scanty,
mentions a _medica_ in an epigram. Apuleius also uses the word. There
are a number of inscriptions in which women physicians are mentioned.
Among the Christians we find women physicians, and Theodosia, the mother
of St. Procopius, the martyr, is said to have been very successful in
the practice of both medicine and surgery. She is numbered among the
martyrs, and occurs in the Roman Martyrology on the 29th of May. Father
Bzowski, the Polish Jesuit, who compiled "Nomenclatura Sanctorum
Professione Medicorum" (Rome, 1621; the book is usually catalogued under
the Latin form of his name, Bzovius), has among his list of saints who
were physicians by profession a woman, St. Nicerata, who lived at
Constantinople in the reign of the Emperor Arcadius, and who is said to
have cured St. John Chrysostom of a serious disease.

The organization of the department of women's diseases at Salerno, under
the care of women professors, and the granting of licenses to women to
practise medicine, is not so surprising in the light of this tradition
among Greeks and Romans, taken up with some enthusiasm by the
Christians. We are not sure just when this development took place. The
first definite evidence with regard to it comes in the life of Trotula,
who seems to have been the head of the department. Some of her books are
well known, and often quoted from, and she contributed to a symposium on
the treatment of disease, in which there are contributions, also, from
men professors of Salerno at the time. She seems to have flourished
about the middle of the eleventh century. Ordericus Vitalis, a monk of
Utica, who wrote an ecclesiastical history, tells of one Rudolph
Malcorona, who, in 1059, came to Utica and remained there for a long
time with Father Robert, his nephew. "This Rudolph had been a student
all his life, devoting himself with great zeal to letters, and had
become famous for his visits to the schools of France and Italy, in
order to gather there the secrets of learning. As a consequence he was
well informed not only in grammar and dialectics, but also in astronomy
and in music. He also possessed such an extensive knowledge of the
natural sciences that in the town of Salerno, where, since ancient
times, the best schools of medicine had existed, there was no one to